Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 13

Finally, Democrats have a good week

I’ve been on a solid high ever since July 21 when I was sitting in a café on South Wabash in Chicago, the El rumbling overhead, and the word came that Joe Biden had stepped out of the race and that Democrats now could find a candidate who demonstrates energy and acuity and passion and is not simply trying to pronounce all his words clearly. I know this sounds cruel but I am Joe’s age and he makes 81 seem like senescence whereas it can be, given good genes and fine pharmaceuticals and some luck, a beautiful chapter of life.

I read the bulletin on my phone and looked around the café packed with people of many shades, and for all I’ve heard about us living in a Third World country, it didn’t look that way to me at all. Chicago is the city of Oprah and Saul Bellow, John Belushi, Mavis Staples, Studs Terkel, where the Rolling Stones made a pilgrimage to see Muddy Waters, which tells me that America is Great and has been for a very long time and people who don’t know that are in need of assistance.

I’d had a bad case of Biden blues imagining that the Con Man might get reelected but Nancy Pelosi took away Joe’s car keys and though it got breathless coverage on the news, to me, an old man who gave up the car keys years ago, it seemed perfectly ordinary. Why punish yourself, trudging through the sludge on the campaign trail? Go home and read French novels and be less miserable.

That was then and since then a miracle has happened: Democrats became a party united in happiness, something we are unaccustomed to. Joe had the presence of mind to declare for his v-p who had remained in the background for three years, as a good v-p should, and in about 48 hours everybody and their cousin fell in love with Kamala Harris and a hundred million bucks flowed in and suddenly Democrats were in the news again. Talk about a fresh face — she looked rather fabulous. A smart woman, well-spoken, ebullient, a person who, unlike the Con, Actually Likes People and who has the flashiest smile in politics today. Mr. Golf Pants has a smirk and a scowl but he couldn’t smile if you turned him upside down and jiggled him. And all week I was getting joyful phone calls from old libs who haven’t been this happy since Barack and Michelle and those two little girls walked out in front of a big Chicago crowd in Grant Park on Election Night, 2008. It was like Baptists having a glass of wine and music is playing and suddenly you’re dancing with your wife. Suddenly Donald Trump’s worst dream comes true: he’s facing a woman prosecutor.

Somewhere, a Republican behavioral consultant has been telling Mr. Trump to be careful insulting a mature woman of color, especially if you’re a convicted felon. Thanks to him, many of his supporters have died from COVID and a new generation has sprung up. If Taylor Swift says the word “Kamala” or a word like it — “comely,” “homily,” “stamina” — this election is over. Young women are going to use GPS to get them to the voting booth and they’ll take selfies in it and maybe do a podcast but they’ll check the boxes marked D for decency and after 250 years we’ll have ourselves a woman in the Oval Office doing the big stuff and her guy can pour tea for visiting dignitaries and celebrate Volunteer Week.

In the Senate Judiciary Committee, it was Kamala who made Brett Kavanaugh choke on his chaw when she asked, “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” She was talking about abortion, but actually there are many such laws, the ones that give the government the right to throw your ass in jail, and that’s why DT is running for office, to make the indictments disappear. Suddenly on July 21st, he felt very much older. And with Sleepy Joe benched, people are going to notice that Mr. Trump loves 130-word sentences with no discernable subject or predicate. Vanity prevents him from wearing glasses so he can’t read the teleprompter and so he keeps giving the same 90-minute rant.

I guess this is what it takes to elect a female president, run an adolescent crook against her. Well, whatever. Taylor, do your duty and wear a Harris button and let’s get this done.

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I am happy and hoping it lasts for four years

I have been a very happy Democrat for the past week and I am not used to this. I’m used to reading about homelessness, hungry children, the pollution by plastics, the warming of the oceans, various daily examples of injustice and cruelty and suffering, but now, even though I am an old Episcopalian writer, I am in love, I’ve been Kamalized. The nation was sunk in depression over a contest between two old white men, one weird and maniacal, the other murmury, and we were praying for a fresh face to come onstage, but who? And then the news flash: Joe withdrew. Another flash: he endorsed Kamala Harris. And suddenly politics, which had been the same old sameness of similitude glaciating toward November 5, became a fascinating story. There was a good reason to read the paper. A smart articulate friendly woman who laughs and who smiles spontaneously and when Oval Orange came out and called her a lunatic and said she’d destroy the country, it made no sense, not even to his elderly biker fans with the white hair ropes coming out of their skulls. It only made O.O. weirder. It made me feel high. Harris vs. the Harasser starts to look like an unfair contest. She’s got a future, he’s only got a troubled past.

I am not used to feeling this way — my people expecting the worst. When happiness struck, they took this as a sign of imminent catastrophe. But Kamala looks to me like a sunny day after a year of trumpification and when she vows to eliminate child hunger in America, she is striking a chord that reverberates left and right. The right of every child to get a decent healthy start in life, no matter the iniquities or carelessness of the parents. Not even the man Senator Vance called “America’s Hitler” can argue with that. And the visual contrast between her and Herr Trump is stunning. A 16-month-old child can see the difference: Angelina Jolie vs. Thor the Avenger.

Everyone in the MAGA camp knows that their man is a first-class pompous jerk who you’d never want to go on a long car trip with. What sort of man would make his teenage granddaughter get up on national TV to say that he is a nice man? And what sort of man would find his granddaughter’s endorsement necessary? Not a nice man.

As for Joe’s 11-minute speech to the nation last Wednesday, it was his chance to tell a story and instead he reeled off a list of accomplishments like he was listing furniture consignments up for auction. no emotion, a deficit of charisma. Joe is a creature of the old gents’ club known as the U.S. Senate and so Trump is incomprehensible to him. Kamala Harris has Mr. Golf Pants nailed: he’s a crook and he’s a champion liar. Every time he stands up, he lies. When it was a contest between two old white men, Trump could sort of pass for human, but Kamala has charisma and she makes him look like an old snapping turtle. I hope she has some good writers. Trump has but they’re wasted because he can’t read. Kamala’s strong suit is her humanity, a quality that Trump never had. He stands next to his youngest son and never puts an arm around him, it’s like they never met. The kid’s misery is painful to see. Kamala is a hugger. She needs to give speeches that sound like a person conversing, not the reading of a mortgage.

I look forward to the First Woman President and wish I could live long enough to see the second and third. Why? I think the FWP could prove to be good and great in ways the MPs never imagined. I think it would be inspiring to my daughter and my great-nieces. And also, when we have a WP, it’ll mean that men are freer to make fun of women and not treat them like delicate china. I spent last week in a summer house in Connecticut with four women and their fussiness –– my God, the endless deliberations about what restaurant to go to and what to wear, meanwhile America stands at the gate of authoritarianism. When Kamala takes Doug to the White House, I’ll be free to speak my mind. The glass ceiling that prevents men from ridiculing women because they’re an oppressed group will be broken. Look out, ladies.

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Even prisoners need a vacation now and then

I turn 82 in a few weeks in the midst of a long tour doing solo shows up Northeast, which is the best way to turn very old, to ride around and entertain beautiful strangers, all of them younger. I do not want to sit at a table of cranks and geezers, each eager to relate his or her own medical history, and then someone wheels in a bonfire of a birthday cake and we sing the old song in our ruined voices and eat melted wax with angel food and someone tells me all about an article they read about carcinoma. I don’t like cake. I’d prefer a pie, rhubarb, with a little tang to it, and two scoops of vanilla. We octogenarians get compliments that sound like eulogies, so go away, stick it in your ear. I’ve had a complicated life with more than my share of wrong turns and incompletes, but I’m in reasonable health, thanks to American medicine, and I have good friends, and I’m married to a smart and funny woman who makes my heart skip when she puts a hand on my shoulder. And I have work to do. God has a purpose for me, yet to be fulfilled, and maybe talking to you, dear reader, is it, so make the best of it. Too bad it’s via internet so you can’t use it afterward for cat litter.

I talk to Him now and then, bargaining about my death. I want to reach 97 as my mother did and be as alert as she and pass from the world in a few days, dozing, listening to gospel music, and He tells me, by way of my wife, that this is my problem, not His, that I need to walk a couple miles briskly every day and eat two meals and cut back on red meat.

The show is educational. I do 90 minutes from memory and some of it is true and I let the audience decide. I also recite limericks. This is a limerick:

There is a stand-up named Keillor

Who is not a nostalgia dealer

And whose talk can

Be rather deadpan

And also surreal and surrealer.

The beauty of octogenarianism is freedom. Your career is over. You’re done. You look out at the crowd and see people googling your name to figure out who you are. It doesn’t matter. Your job is to cheer up the people who are depressed seeing that trailer trash from Queens is headed back to the White House. White Castle is more his taste. The man lies like a cheap carpet. If you saw him a few years ago attempt to comically impersonate the reporter who has cerebral palsy, that is all you need to know about the man. He is not 78, he is 13. The American people are exercising their perfect right to irony and electing a delinquent to be the leader of the Free World. My job this summer and fall is to stay on the sunny side of the street and avoid words such as grump, slump, dump, hump, rump, and sump pump.

I might recite: “All of the lovers and the love they made — nothing between them was a mistake — all that we did for love’s sake was not wasted and will never fade,” and I almost believe this, the forgiving of my own mistakes. I do my poem about sperm. Sometimes I come across an audience that wants to sing and we sing “America” or the “Battle Hymn.” And if it feels right, I hum “When peace like a river attendeth my way” and they’re right there with me and we do “It Is Well with My Soul.” Some audiences tolerate this and others are actually moved. I started performing in my thirties for the usual reason, to be the center of attention, but now I hope to be useful. The country is in peril. Most people know this and don’t need me to tell them. I want to give them ninety minutes during which they won’t think about the peril whatsoever and then, driving home, it will dawn on them all the harder. Prisoners need a vacation, just like everyone else. That’s my advice, sweetheart. Take time off. Go camping, hike up a river canyon, look at the stars at night, play games with children, practice the art of seduction on your spouse, go for days without reading the paper, and when you come back to it, you will be properly alarmed.

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And so it ends on a Saturday in Pennsylvania

I have a feeling that the 2024 campaign is effectively over, thanks to a gunman shooting him in the ear and Mr. Trump having the presence of mind, as the Secret Service carried him to safety, to thrust his right fist in the air and shout, “Fight, fight.” The photograph of him doing it, streaks of blood on his face, the flag flying behind him — there is no way for Joe Biden to argue with that photograph. If I were Joe, I’d be thinking of a country to fly to on January 19, the day before treason charges are filed, perhaps Sweden.

Senator J.D. Vance promptly accused Democrats of responsibility, that Biden’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Others blamed the Deep State, Antifa, elitists, transgender persons, and a Republican congressman said, “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Democrats failed to put forward a theory of their own, given Vance’s line, that President Trump had attempted to “assassinate” himself by snipping his ear with a fingernail clipper, but they didn’t. Democrats are a bunch of clerks and clerics, no talent for fiction.

And Democrats are now in utter confusion. Their leaders are folks who loved high school debate, making your point, rebutting the opponent’s. Mr. Trump is a new phenomenon, a stream-of-consciousness orator who goes on at great length uninhibited by factuality or even relevance, and his interest in actual government policy is slight at best. People were sick and tired of scripted politicians and they love him for his rants and improvisations, the wilder the better. He launched himself in politics as a birther, arguing that Barack Obama wasn’t an American citizen but a Kenyan. He stuck to this position for five years before acknowledging that the birth certificate was authentic and that Hawaii is part of America. From this undistinguished start, Mr. Trump went on to invent the Make America Great Again cap, a truly brilliant idea because nobody knows what it means on any particular day. And he demanded that Republicans deny the existence of the 2020 election and they obeyed.

What he will do in his second term is anyone’s guess. A red wave could give us a solid Republican Congress, and if it replaced Civil Service with political patronage, outlawed abortion utterly and gay marriage and rewrote the libel laws to inhibit investigative journalism while creating a commission to approve or disapprove movies and TV for their faithfulness to American cultural values, it could all be accomplished in three months flat. Will he deport ten or twelve million people? Ukraine will surely fall and the Soviet Union will rise. NATO will become a shadow, Europe will need to make its own arrangements with Putin.

I am not an elitist. I have tried to talk like one at times, using words like “hierarchical,” “hegemony,” and phrases like “the weaponization of outright ignorance,” but nobody is fooled. I do enjoy having a president I can look down on, like Nixon, who, having installed a taping system in the Oval Office, said, “I am not a crook.” Not smart. Reagan was an actor and able to conceal his mental decline. Clinton had bubba tendencies, Dubya was Dubya. And when you have a tycoon with a titanic ego, anybody with an ear for balloon juice can be a satirist.

Hillary came off as an elitist when she should’ve stalked across the stage at the first debate and grabbed Trump’s crotch. Biden spent a week preparing for the debate, memorizing statistics, then got confused when Trump said that Biden’s administration was the worst in American history and that America had become a Third World country. Biden should’ve said, “You are a werewolf and you drink the blood of aborted infants.” But he didn’t because it’s not true. Big mistake.

If twenty years ago you had written this in a novel called Schlump, it would’ve been wicked satire but now we’re living in it, and what I intend to do is go back to ordinary comedy. The Lord came down to visit the earth and met a man who was crying. The Lord asked, “Why are you crying, my son?” The man said, “I’m blind and I’ve never seen a sunrise.” The Lord touched the man’s eyes and the sun rose and he was happy. Then the Lord met another man crying. The man said, “I’m a Democrat.” And the Lord sat down and cried with him.

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A trip back home to get my bearings

I was in St. Paul last week, walking around, remembering my glory days there, the basement studio where I did a morning DJ show, my first house on Goodrich Avenue across the street from Scott Fitzgerald’s house where he lived with Zelda and wrote “Winter Dreams,” the Fitzgerald Theater downtown where I did a show for years. When I stuck my head in the door last Wednesday and walked down to the stage I remembered how incredibly lucky I had been in that town.

A few blocks away, is the train depot where my dad rode the westbound North Coast Limited twice a week, in the mail car, a .38 pistol on his hip. My mother, in her late teens, lived in St. Paul and earned pocket money going door to door selling peanut butter cookies in brown lunchbags. I grew up and had no interest in football so went in the opposite direction and tried to be a writer. I wanted to write like Kafka though I’d never been persecuted so it didn’t work but when my wife got pregnant I needed to earn a living and landed a job in radio by virtue of being the only applicant — it was the 6 a.m. shift — and obviously my audience wasn’t looking for existential dread, especially not in winter, they needed King Oliver and the Golden Gate Quartet and the Red Clay Ramblers. I come from serious people but I needed to learn to do comedy, so I did. A person can learn these things: brevity, word choice, timing, a wild streak. And cheerfulness is good.

It’s the Midwest, a culture that places a high value on modesty and self-deprecation, avoids irony, follows the rules and gives rule-breakers a sidelong look, keeps complaint to a minimum, prizes loyalty, and is well-practiced at ignoring flamboyance and foolishness and pretense. But sanctimonious bullies thrive here, too. At the Tchaikovsky ballet, a woman comes onstage to remind us to turn our phones off and she says, “We wish to acknowledge that the land we are on was taken from the Dakotah people,” and we all bow our heads at this cheap piety. There are people devoting their lives to education, health care, justice, among impoverished people, and this simpleton enjoys a little glow from reading a line off an index card. She might as well say, “We acknowledge that the nondegradable plastics that come with our concession products are causing damage to the planet that our children will inherit.”

I come from people who grew vegetable gardens, worked on their own cars, avoided ostentation. Women sewed, men did plumbing and carpentry. My generation broke with that and I could no more fix a leaky toilet than I could read Proust in French. My parents drank black coffee from a can you opened with a little key and brewed in a percolator. My generation is capable of asking for Sumatran dark, rainforest, not farm grown, cold-brewed in a French press and dripped through an unbleached paper filter. With oat milk. But wild oats, not domesticated. Or mushroom milk, if you have it. And if the cup of coffee costs $18, so be it. I’ve seen this in coffee shops. As a result, I only drink black coffee and I will not drink it from cups with humorous sayings on them. Thus I honor my people.

I left Minnesota and now I live in New York City. My wife lived my life for twenty years and now it’s her turn and she loves the big city where she lived before she met me. I’m okay with New York, I enjoy being a nobody — it’s the Midwesterner in me. Being in New York only makes me more Minnesotan than when I lived in St. Paul where I made a pretense of sophistication, but in a New York restaurant, eating with New Yorkers, I admire their finesse with profanity, their sense of the tragic, the operatic complaints about the insults of ordinary life, the gossip, the brilliant insults of famous people they’ve encountered: I have nothing to offer, I’m a child at the grown-up table.

I’m an old man and keenly aware of deterioration, my own and others’, but I’m still working, and I go back to St. Paul and sit in the café where I ate the year I dropped out of college to be a newspaper reporter. College was wasted on me; work was what I wanted. It’s still true today. My wife is a walker, I’m a worker. Thank you, St. Paul. See you again soon.

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Learning from other people how to make America better

I felt the world turn Monday when my wife walked up to a tree, snapped a picture of it with her phone, googled the picture, and said, “It’s a Japanese maple.” Then she did the same to a Siberian pine. I’d never seen anyone do this before. I thought of all the Boy Scouts who earned merit badges by learning to identify trees and this gave them the self-confidence to go on to important careers in government and finance. I thought of people who majored in botany and impressed their friends at parties by saying, “That’s not an ordinary maple. It’s Japanese.” Now a fourth-grader can do it. Maybe even a second.

I don’t mind being married to someone smarter than I. I’ve come to depend on it. It means I don’t need to read about the heat wave or the elections in France and the U.K.; she handles all that for me.

I did however read about the contest in Nigeria between two men, Sanusi and Aminu, for the emirate of Kano, which I think suggests a way for America to get through the next five months with our democracy intact and the economy thriving. Nigeria is a democracy, a modern populous country, rich with oil, but it has maintained monarchs, men who have no official duties but who wield influence because they maintain the loyalty of millions. They sit on golden thrones under silk canopies, courtiers fan them, the faithful bow at their feet, and — this is the beautiful part — the emirs wear strips of cloth wound around their heads in a turban with a strip covering the mouth as a sign of dignified silence.

The idea of silent leaders, objects of worshipful admiration who do not speak and thereby gain even greater loyalty, is monarchy in its purest form and it’s what is missing in our Constitution. In Nigeria, an emirship is not a hereditary position: emirs are chosen by kingmakers. And in America, this would be the media along with our three former emirs, Obama, Clinton, and Bush, and for the good of the country, they could agree on this by next Friday: Donald and Joseph will be enthroned, fanned, worshipped, paraded under beautiful parasols, and not another word will come out of their mouths. The Trumpian multitudes will face off against the Bidensians, elaborate insults will be exchanged, threats, flags will wave, and each side will be armed with sticks, only sticks, guns will be reserved for the armed forces, meanwhile the government will be run, as it is run today and has been run for ages, by anonymous educated technocrats.

America has fallen prey to the romantic myth of the President. Democrats idealized Kennedy and Obama, Republicans revered Reagan, but national life is too fractured and diverse for us to be governed by mythology. California is burning and sliding into the sea, the Mississippi is flooding, progressive teachers are instructing our third-graders in Marxism, Venezuelan voting machines have corrupted the elections, the 18-second pitching clock has destroyed baseball and turned the country toward soccer and pickleball, working-from-home has turned downtowns to deserts, the mystery of Taylor Swift has divided generations, streaming video has killed the American novel, and it’s time to set the Constitution aside and lock the three former emirs along with the Yale faculty and the Southern Baptist Convention — lock them into Grand Central Station with only PB&J sandwiches and Coke until they come up with a new form of government that incorporates monarchy into democracy.

Donald and Joseph, silent, led through the streets, carried in majesty on the shoulders of their adherents, carrying on this campaign for years to come, the brash bully boy and the hesitant gramps, silk over their mouths, meanwhile capable men and women manage diplomacy, national defense, repair the roads, control air traffic, deliver the mail, finance health care and education, and put on the fireworks shows.

Last Thursday evening, the Fourth, I sat under the Japanese maple on our terrace in New York City and saw a tremendous display from lower Manhattan, great booming arcs and domes and crowns of sparkling lights that went on and on for almost an hour. The country needs more of this, and with two rival emirs, each could strive to out-firework the other. More pageantry, more parades, flags, bunting, marching bands with majorettes. Make America Great Again versus Make America Caring Again, MAGA vs. MACA. I own a Siberian pine. I know what I’m talking about.

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The week we drifted down the Niagara River

In church Sunday we sang “All people who on earth do dwell” with the beautiful line about serving God with mirth, the only hymn that calls us to comedy, and it made me feel good after this dreadful past week in which mirth has been hard to find.

Suddenly I miss Jonathan Winters, the comic who worked in fragments — I wish he were here, he’d handle today’s news to perfection. Elderly dither was his specialty so he’d have done the Debate in 25 seconds: Biden’s breathless tremolo, the stricken eyes, the dazed solemnity, and Trump in nonsense Deutsch, the pump of a shotgun, baritone chortling, a sidelong snarl, the snap of a whip. Today’s comics are writers and they work in whole sentences and paragraphs but Winters was all phrases and feeling, lunacy, terror, smug confidence, profound stupidity. You can find an abundance of him on YouTube and while you’re there you can check out other varnished geniuses, the dignity of Buster Keaton in his triumphant defeats, the sweetness of Laurel & Hardy — once in a while when I feel gloomy, I google their three-minute dance in “Way Out West,” the fatso and the man-child doing an innocent buck-and-wing to the Avalon Boys singing “At the Ball, That’s All” on a busy street, oblivious to and ignored by the busy world around them.

Here we all are, adrift on the Niagara River hearing the roar of a Trump second term a few miles ahead, the Democratic Party in its usual confusion as the American Midwest looks forward to the election of a cruel tyrant such that Mark Twain could never have imagined and perhaps the demolition of civil society and here we are on the raft and nobody on shore is throwing us a rope so what can we do? We just hold hands and sing.

Commence advancing, commence advancing

Just start a-prancing and dancing,

Snap your fingers one and all

At the ball, at the ball, that’s all.

I am grateful, at 82, to have seen a great period of American history, of advances in science and technology and the idea of equality under the law, a heroic age when “all men are created equal” came to include Black people and women and when public compassion grew to accept categories of people formerly shoved aside such as drunks and people we used to call “morons” and “imbeciles.” And now we await the return of a president who never in his public utterance has shown an ounce of compassion except sympathy for himself, a man bent on revenge with a plan for making government of the people by angry people for wealthy people, a government bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, which denies the warming of the oceans, the poisoning of the environment.

And that’s why I’m on the road this summer doing comedy in little theaters in the Midwest and the Northeast. I do jokes about aging and tell stories about my hometown and maybe toss out a limerick —

There was an attractive stockbroker

Who beat everybody at poker.

Her blouse was revealing

And also concealing

The Queen of Hearts and the Joker.

And if they go for that, there’s the young man from Madras, the young fellow from Pocatello, the woman who lived in Vancouver who drank two quarts of varnish remover and didn’t get ill or vomit but still it didn’t do much to improve her. Or Henry David Thoreau who lived in the woods long ago and wrote lovely prose while his mom washed his clothes and fixed him hot lunches to go. Not many limericists are wandering around loose these days so I feel a duty to stand up for the genre. I have amazed people by reciting the 87 counties of Minnesota in alphabetical order in less than one minute. I can reel off some fine sonnets and an excellent long poem about sperm. But one part of the act that people enjoy is the audience singing a cappella “My country, ’tis of thee” into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” into “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and maybe “In My Life” or “Going to the Chapel.” It’s very sweet. A mature audience and they haven’t done this since the sixth grade but they sing about the glory of the coming of the Lord and the trampling of the vintage of the grapes of wrath. It’s a great Republican hymn but nobody who has read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps can vote for the dictator, I can tell you that.

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Standing up for the age of 81

The age of 81 has come under close scrutiny recently and, as an occupant, I should say a few words in its behalf. Most people are younger than 81, some much younger, and when they see me come onstage, they’re impressed that I’m upright and mobile. I walk to the microphone and speak entire sentences into it that apparently make sense. I don’t doubt that some maybe wonder, if I drop dead, will their ticket be refunded at the box office or will they need to go through a complicated procedure online. But what I say makes sense as do my various hand gestures — Magnanimity (Open Hands), Profundity (Index Finger), Thoughtfulness (Hands Pressed In A Steeple), Thumbs Up — and they relax and attend to what I have to say.

A man of 81 has quite a bit to say. It’s too late to try to be hip; back in my twenties I was hip and wrote bad poems about the fascination of unreality, the beauty of cloudiness and mystery and longing for meaning that I thought were beautiful. Now I know that honesty and compassion and kindness are beautiful and there’s no mystery about that.

Some people get to the age of 78 without knowing this. Some people know it by 18 or 21. I was 40 when I quit smoking. I did it because smoking made me feel bad. This realization should’ve happened earlier. I quit drinking because early morning is my best time of day and hangovers are a knapsack of rocks I can well do without, but I was in my 50s when this dawned on me. Duh.

Octogenarians have less need to search for themselves; they can pay more attention to what’s around them. You stand at a lectern listening to a man of 78 at another lectern claim to be greater than Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln, claiming that he won an election by a landslide though he got fewer votes — this is truly amazing. If you were 21, you might think, “Well, this is what politicians do.” When you’re 81, you know this is an absurdity and politicians mostly stay away from the absurd. They don’t campaign by yodeling while riding unicycles and carrying ferrets on their shoulders and wearing a cap with a revolving red light. They try to make sense.

Longevity is getting longer thanks to medical progress, more people hitting their nineties, which means that you can do dumb things well into your seventies and still have time to recover. Donald Trump could still become a decent modest human being and learn to tell a joke. I truly believe this.

I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a good neighborhood for an old man. Everything is within walking distance: the drugstore, grocery, the dental hygienist. It’s ten blocks to church, which is long enough to think about what needs to change in my life. When I walk in, I feel welcome. Standing on a corner, waiting for the light to change, I easily strike up small talk with the woman pushing the stroller next to me. Something as simple as “Beautiful day today.” She agrees. I like this ease of familiarity. I see progress all around me — the crackers aisle at Trader Joe’s has a hundred varieties whereas we used to have five: soda, graham, Cheez-Its, animal, and Goldfish. Dozens and dozens of takeout possibilities where once we only had chow mein, tacos, burgers, and pizza. The linguistic innovations — my generation didn’t have the word “totally” — we found things “sort of interesting” — we didn’t have “awesome” back then, just “cool.” I saw bubblegum-flavor toothpaste in Walgreens and also cucumber soap. Nothing to a youngster, but to me, astonishing.

I’m old enough to remember horse-drawn haywagons, outhouses, coal-burning furnaces, and my grandma’s reminiscence of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. I saw Albert Woolson, the last living Civil War veteran, riding in a parade. I saw Rod Carew steal third and then steal home base. I once saw the Everly Brothers sing “Precious Memories.” But what is most memorable to me is the kindness of my teacher Estelle Shaver when I was six, the kindness of my mother, my aunts, and the two men, Marvin Granger and Bill Kling, who hired me for jobs in radio despite poor grades and vast inexperience. Human kindness, overflowing. This is what I think about as I walk those ten blocks on Sunday morning: The Lord is good and His mercy endureth forever.

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My take on the question, so you won’t have to wait

The debate was a joke, a cruel joke. Trump was the drunk in the corner saloon, sailing on vodka martinis, and Biden was a serious man attempting to frame an argument in response to unreality and in so doing he searched for the right words, as any normal person would, and so the journalists said, “TRUMP SHOWS ENERGY, BIDEN APPEARS HESITANT,” and suddenly working reporters gauge the popular mood and see Trump winning the night. This is silliness. “I am the greatest,” is a boxer’s brag. It’s nothing a president would ever say, it is unhinged. Muhammad Ali said it but he had to actually get in the ring and hit a man and be hit by him, risk having his brains scrambled, he couldn’t just raise a half-billion from friends to make himself famous even among ferrets and armadillos.

Nobody actually admires Trump; half the people loathe him on sight as a New York loudmouth and phony who’s won the favor of Christians even though his ordinary speech is laced with obscenities. Preachers don’t talk in obscenities, not where I come from, but some of them did some fancy gymnastics and joined the cult. It’s fascinating but not admirable. Trump degrades everything he touches. That’s why there is no Trump University and there’s no Trump Library, they are contradictions. The Republicans sucking up to him now will go down in history as suck-ups, whether they think so or not. It will be a blot on the record. Their biographers will have to work their way around it, like a conviction for embezzlement or marriage to a cousin.

There is such a thing as history. Politics, believe it or not, is not all unreality. It does have an effect on the world around us and Trump knows this. He does his shadow show so that he can tinker with the government according to his passing moods. He is a moody man and his tirades, as printed verbatim in actual newspapers, are worth your time to read, it’s like seeing a great horned sloth in a cage at a filling station in Memphis: you never knew any living creature could be so ugly and smelly and devour its own fecal matter.

In the Presidents Day survey of 154 historians who’ve studied and written about the office, both liberals and conservatives and in-between, Trump winds up near the bottom, with Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan who’ve been at the bottom for a long long time. Biden is ranked in the top third, though surely there is disagreement. But this is a survey of people who did the homework, not the opinion of fools.

The country is in a crazy place right now and if you love your country, you know this. Say all you like about the crazy progressive left, go right ahead — I am aware that the rudeness is remarkable — but the American people are not about to elect one to the White House, so calm down. You can imagine that Trump is riding a rural revolt against city elite, but the man is a fool. He doesn’t know the Morrill Act from the Immorrill; in Roe v. Wade, he doesn’t know who was rowing and who was wading.

No Democrat can take pleasure in the demise of the Grand Old Party of the Heart of the Country by a queen from Queens. You don’t run around the Midwest talking about your greatness; you’re talking to actual farmers who know manure when they see it. When Senator Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996, he didn’t claim to have won it. One difference between him and Trump, and also he did the homework and spoke softly though he was a war hero and he is still admired widely today by those who met him. He was genuine.

In Minnesota we’ve come to the sad realization that corporations don’t have souls. Our beloved 3M has done wretched things and poisoned its own people and lied about it, which no human being you respect would do. Trump is a corporation, he is not a genuine human being. He is not vermin, he is apparently sensate and responds to commands, but he has conquered his own soul and a soulless man does not care. That is not a quality one seeks in a leader. A Shakespearean tale is unwinding and it does not appear to me to be a comedy.

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The story of my life, a brief version

My bio in 100 words is as follows: My parents were in love with each other, had six kids, I was third, an invisible child. I had no interest in crashing into people so didn’t play football or hockey and avoided brain damage. I dabbled in poetry and when I was 14, I read A.J. Liebling and decided to be a writer. I went into radio, which requires no special skill, and took the sunrise shift, which turned me toward comedy, listeners don’t want grievous introspective reflections at 5 a.m. I told stories for forty years and still do. I married well on the third try.

There you have it: perseverance, not brilliance, is the key. I walk out on stage, the audience assumes it’s the janitor. I have no stage fright because my vision is so poor, I don’t notice them looking at me. They pity that old man on stage but I’m holding a microphone and that’s the advantage: when I hum, they hum with me and we all sing “My country, ’tis of thee” and they’re amazed by how good it sounds. The audience entertains itself.

I’m lucky, when it comes right down to it. Last Monday, after seeing my cardiologist, I stopped at an Italian café for a big plate of sausage lasagna and in my fascination with a nearby conversation between several surgeons I forgot my hand-corrected book manuscript on the table, on the East Side of Manhattan. I discovered this when I got home, three miles away. I’d paid the café with cash, had no receipt, couldn’t remember the name. I went to the East Side, walked around, nothing looked familiar. Ran into a couple who knew me from my show and they looked up Italian cafés on their phone and told me it was probably on First Avenue. (I was on Third.) I walked over and recognized the hot dog stand, the Citibank, and there was the café. I walked in, the maître d’ recognized me, got the manuscript out of his desk, handed it to me. I gave him a hundred bucks. Now I wish I’d given him three hundred. Cheapskate.

As we say, “The Lord is good and His mercy endureth forever.” Old age is turning out to be my favorite part of life. I worked much too hard for much too long, was driven, and in the process did a whole series of dumb things that we needn’t recount here. I was lucky to live at a time when cardiology came of age and they could sew up a leaky valve like you’d fix a shoe. At the doctor’s Monday, a young woman adjusted my heart monitor/defibrillator, standing at a computer at my elbow: she said, “Now I’m slowing your heart …” and did, and said, “Now I’m speeding up your heart,” and she did that. I said, “Many women have made my heart beat faster,” and she actually laughed at a joke she must’ve heard a thousand times, maybe two. That’s a whole other miracle, the patience of health care with patients.

When I was 12, I helped my aunt Josephine slaughter chickens at her little farm. I was sent with a wire hook fashioned from a clothes hanger to chase chickens and snatch them by their ankles and I chased one into the garage and snatched her and then realized it was a chicken I knew as Chuck though she was a hen. A trans chicken, perhaps. She squawked and flapped and I didn’t see how I could participate in the killing of a chicken I knew personally, had talked to, had named, but on the other hand, if not her it would be some other chicken. An awesome power in my hand. I stroked her and she calmed down. I decided it would be better for her to go to the chopping block with someone who loved her than with someone rough and cold, and so she was delivered to the axe. She had enjoyed being fed and now she would become food, a sort of symmetry to her life, and Aunt Jo was a tremendous cook, working at a wood-burning stove, and her fried chicken was memorable.

Someday a boy with a coat hanger will chase me around the yard and into a garage and take me in his arms and calm me down. I only want it to be peaceful. I want to be useful up to the end and have all my wits about me but that of course is for others to decide. Thank you for reading. It was my pleasure.

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